


Youth

by Imprise



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Abstract, F/M, Romanticism, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-05-14
Packaged: 2018-06-08 08:43:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6847567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imprise/pseuds/Imprise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully and Mulder slowly work through their issues in series of moments that deal with the harder things between them, such as Scully's cancer, and their slowly evolving love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Youth

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is meant to be a look into the more quiet side of Mulder and Scully as they grow young together.

“Scully,” he says. Two and a half hours later, she'll be on her knees in the basement bathroom, but it won't be for the reason they both quietly want it to be. She'll taste Mulder's bitter coffee and Mulder's dry sandwich and think about how he says her name, and then she'll really want to cry. Now, while he talks, she commits each lipbite and quirk-of-the-mouth to inimitable memory and imagines every one of them loving her. He recognizes how small and fragile the moment is, with her gaze and its dark curiosity, but cannot understand why she is suddenly so ferocious and soulful in her watchfulness. He doesn't know how soon after Scully will be on her knees, and why she will be crying. He also doesn't know why she can never cry to him, beside him on his shoulder or pectorals, or why she needs so badly to wear her unyielding warriorlike suits.

She is leaning very slightly on the edge of the desk, against which he has so often wished to hold her up by the thighs, and touch the little white hollow of her untouchable neck. There will be no more black suitjacket, and she will let him lick her underbite. He thinks that jacket to be the ultimate representation of all the tension and bitterness between them, and knows she would be deliciously tender under it, an endless stretch of creamy glowing skin. He wants to take her cross in his mouth, her earlobe and eyelashes between his blushing lips,

because if she'd just let him he'd imbibe her, and she doesn't believe this, because she would let him.

 

x

 

Two more hours and she's ready to go. Her sinuses are pounding against her gaping cancer-cavity, her self-diagnosed black hole, sucking down her little loves like stars. It has kept sucking ever since the hospital where Mulder embraced her, and burned her cheeks with kisses. This hollow is one among infinite other hollows in her body, but it now seems like the largest and most significant in relation to her recent transformation. She no longer stays in the twilight basement just to become a little more precious to tall, coltish, abrasive Fox Mulder.

“I'm leaving,” she announces, and he looks up from under his glasses in mild surprise.

“All right.” He searches her face. Sometimes he misses the plump, rosy Dana Scully of 1993, pink and angry, the woman who had tried to call her Fox. Over the years, spiny fetid Mulder has turned her cold and knifelike and maddeningly separate, from him and his slow territorialism. She looks forlorn and unapproachable in her black suit and rigid spine, so he leaves it at _all right._

Mulder wants to lift her up onto a filing cabinet and extensively love her left ventricle. He wants to mold his dumb restless mouth to her collarbone and cresting breast. He used to want to fuck her more than all of these things, when she was five feet of curvy hip and youthful ferocity and could quote her thesis on Einstein. Now he wants slightly more to build a home inside her body. He remembers that Scully once told him how she thought of her absent cancer, like she possessed an emptiness where it used to be, and thinks that if he could have just fit in that little emptiness something would click into place in the universe.

 

x

 

She almost says “Fox,” when he looms suddenly above her, spreading a delicate warmth over the doorstep. Instead, she says “What?”, and her cancer-hole grows.

Mulder's first instinct is not to say _Dana_. He would have said something like _I want to live in your forehead_ , but that would be spooky, and that's not how Mulder works. So, instead he says “Dana,” because somehow he thinks that if he could have just loved her a little sooner, the something between them would have been whole.

Scully thinks a little of the same, except she also feels like being sucked into an insane, corporal kiss by this insanely corporal man, because there is really no alternative when he is so deliberately present. But they don't kiss and instead become Fox and Dana, and sit down on her couch and try to clean up the total sterility of her apartment.

Dana is more waifish and infinitely more tender than sharp Agent Scully, and would smile at being Fox Mulder's one in five billion. She does not need as badly to keep on the suitjacket, and lets Fox see the beautiful bonecurve of a sloping, birdlike shoulder. Her bedroom is not compulsively tidy and she does not think regularly about things like dying, or the unpredictability of Mulder's semi-smile. Dana is all of these little, fertile things, and Scully has a forehead hollow and wants to eviscerate her partner, and they both watch him tilt his nose to the sun from her window.

Bathed in this light, Mulder is not a tightmouthed wisecracking wild child, and she does not smell of corpses. Bathed in this light, Mulder is slowly seeping into her as young Fox into younger Dana, and she cannot stand not touching him as they sink into this unison. He would have preferred to lay his head on her permissive breast or to cradle within his overlarge hands her delicate, delicate skull, but instead she takes his wrist and strokes it, and somehow this is enough for Mulder and his strange, fluted heart.

 

x

 

Their next case is in Connecticut and it rains. Mulder wishes he could flow into her again, but today she is Agent Scully and there is no sun. They careen around the stupid crime scene and Scully autopsies the stupid corpse and Mulder spews some of his stupid, stupid ideas, hating every part of it. He bites out responses to her terse questions and they both suffocate in the wastefulness of a day in which they are not buried inside each other.

“You know, Mulder,” she finally says, “we should just leave if you're going to be this way.”

Mulder turns from his spoonlike position over the earthbed, and she is just about to leave him there when she sees along with him the object of his attention, a clump of red wildflowers. It breaks her heart to watch him turn away from all this loveliness and look at her like she is somehow lovelier than the soft earth and the rain, and their willful red children. She catches it in his eyes, the slack slump of his lower lip, and knows that there is no one else in the observable universe that she would ever love like this.

Dana drives on the way back and lets Mulder watch the peak of one lonely vertebra from under her knotted hair. If the drive ends, she knows the spell will break, so they trace circles around Alexandria until D.C. revolves away from the sun.

 

x

 

Her apartment is littered with sunflower seeds. Fox brought them in, and his mouth has been or will be on each and every one of them. It is a dazzling newness to escape the clinical hygiene of her habitation, to let Mulder come into her house and slowly unravel her meticulous order with six feet of chaos and adoration, a man totally and wholesomely alive. It amazes her, the fiercely orderly Dana Scully, to be so infested with love for him. It feels like being with him is a cosmically resonant _yes_ , in which he untucks her tightnesses and hardnesses and sometimes even makes her smile.

 _Lick my lower lip_ , she wants to tell him. _Please, Fox, lick my windpipe, the heel of my hand, Fox, hold my arching instep, because I want to be taken apart_. But Mulder doesn't do these things because he thinks she won't want him to, so he leaves her sunflower seeds.

 

x

 

He's taken to talking to her without looking her in the eyes. It bothers Scully a lot, makes her skittish and irritable. He delineates a theory to her over their newest dead body and doesn't catch her eyes, and she feels like she's missing out on a prize, on the gorgeous swelling sun of Fox Mulder's gaze, because he looks at her with the same intensity he reserves for cryptid mandibles and extraterrestrials and The Truth.

Scully wonders if this intensity will ever compare to that with which he regards Samantha, and decides it won't. Mulder knows she transcended his sister in importance a long time ago, but won't ever let her know it, so he avoids her eyes and sleeps with his left shoulder buried into the mattress.

“Why won't you look at me?” she says finally as they coast down the interstate. Their dead body is evolving into a real X-File, and Mulder hasn't once locked eyes with her, not over law enforcement or dinner or the flimsy table of a no-vacancy motel.

It would be so easy to tell her _I love you. I love you and I can't separate myself from you, so I carve out this tiny space for me and my ruminations between your beautiful eyebrows, where I gave you cancer. I don't need to remind myself of how much irrevocable pain lies right there in that hollow, in those achingly lovely eyes._

“Dana,” is what comes out of his mouth as he turns to look at her face, and it's like watching the sun come out upon his eyes.

 

x

 

They've settled into a companionable intimacy where she lets him take her hand, and he pretends she loves him unreasonably. Scully may never have done anything unreasonable in her life, but it almost feels all right to hope for it when she becomes Dana and lets him touch her at work. They're doing obscene amounts of paperwork and he brushes her wrist with two long fingers, and suddenly there is nothing in the world except her white limbs and his large, coarse hands.

Scully does not look at him, but yearns deeply to take one of those fingers and suck on it, very idly, idly enough to make him hiss.

“Did you file the Vermont case up to Skinner?” she asks, and curls a pinky over his index finger.

Mulder stiffens as he says “No.” It is usual for Dana to not-touch and Fox to over-touch until, it seems, the universe folds over in two. Now it has folded and he can do nothing but say, “Do you want to get out of here?” and hope wildly that she says yes.

“Where?”

He considers. “Anywhere. Away from the basement.”

Agent Scully wants to say _no, Mulder, when there's work there's work and you're being horribly unprofessional_. Agent Scully wants to ice him in that chair with one slick look. Dana wants to jump his bones in the bathroom, and she wants to see the sun, so she takes his arm a little more firmly and kisses the skin under his earlobe.

It is the holiest experience of Fox Mulder's life.

 

x

 

He buys her ice cream and sits an appropriate three inches apart from her on the bench. They haven't reported their absence, and he is fairly certain they won't be missed. Instead they watch the reflecting pool and stay quiet, and it is a soft comfortable silence in which they think of nothing but each other and the red earth.

“Do you think I'm crazy, Mulder?”

She looks at him levelly, the gravity of her question hanging between them.

“What?” he says, because he doesn't understand, and it is the wrong thing to say. Scully tells him quickly to forget about it and angles her body away from him, eastward into the cold.

“Scully,” he mutters, “I just want to know why you asked.”

“I told you to forget it.”

 _You're completely insane,_ he should tell her. _You let me touch your hair and sleep on your couch and only shot me once, and recently forewent the presence of mind to wear a suitjacket._

“I'm lost,” she says after a while. “Mulder, I feel like... I feel like everything I always thought I was is slowly changing around me.”

“Do you want to take a break?” he asks, and the implied _from me_ hangs unsaid between them.

She sighs and holds her nose close to the cancer-hollow. “I want to resolve this inside myself before I come back.”

Mulder feels something very dark grow in the pits of his paneled heart. This is the end, he knows, because Scully is not crazy, and will never come back.

“I hope you do,” he says, “come back,” and if he could just have cried it might have changed something, but it comes out short and cold and Scully could have placed one small hand on his head, but she walks down the poolside onto the road.

 

x

 

She tidies her apartment and sleeps on the cold floor, because it is too tiring for her to pretend it's an ordinary night. Her nose and throat are silhouetted in the black glass of her bedroom door, stark and livid, lethal weapons. She wonders if this is how Mulder sees her and wishes she'd cried in front of him more often, because somewhere in time Fox Mulder became her universe and she needs this large creation to recognize her smallness as a part of a little and holy love. It was around the start of this becoming that her faith resurfaced, when she realized her submersion into her partner and saw it truly sacred, and wanted to seem a small part more human to herself.

She wants him to teeth on her body until she is made of bitemarks and inconveniences, and touches the indentations to remember that he was once real. This is why she keeps his stupid keychain and the parking ticket he forgot on her table, because they remind her that Mulder was actual and knowable and once liked her appreciably. She worries she is crazy, because knifeblade whiplash Scully is bluring into Dana who likes the sun, and suddenly allows Mulder and his mouth to permeate her visible skin. The sharpness of her cancerself smudges when she lets herself be young again, when she lets him be Fox, when they slip into an intimacy that feels like it has always, always been there. Her black hole stretches when she and Mulder are not touching, because he touches with the air of religious worship, of tight taut inexplicable tension, like he wants nothing more than to plunge his hand into her and stroke the olive-pits of her heart.

In the morning, she buys sunflower seeds and takes the car to Alexandria to park behind Mulder and imagine his hands on the planes of her body. It is time after seven years to pour into each other, because Dana Scully the rosy idealist and Fox Mulder the tireless, turned scalpel-sharp Scully and abrasive Mulder, have somehow become Fox and Dana.

She walks up to his door slowly, taking the time to notice things. Number sixteen has cats and dandruff and twenty-three hasn't picked up the paper in five days. Mulder's hall smells like aged leather and ghost kisses, and she presses her white forehead to the door. He is right here, behind this flimsy piece of wood, this man she hasn't seen in two consecutive days. She wonders how she ever went through life without him, before his coltish touches and forehead kisses.

He opens the door and blinks.

“You're crazy,” he mumbles.

Scully shuffles a little closer. She's wearing soft red and looks unnervingly edible. He wants to eat her and her arrogant nose, bends down hesitantly to press his cheek to her hair, to smell the wonderful wholeness of her body.

She tilts her face up and feels for the first, loveliest time his swollen lower lip, the softness of his mouth, and nibbles and nibbles his upper carotid. Mulder thinks that if he doesn't kiss he will cry, so he keeps kissing her and kissing her until they start breathing through each other, his fingers stroking her delicate temples as hers burn into his cheekbones, into the back of his head, pressed tightly against the wall as he braces her to him. She intends fully to kiss him blissfully raw.

This is Fox's one and only truly numinous experience. He licks his way right down to Dana Scully's beckoning collarbone and sucks on it, eats out the little hollows of her throat as she presses the heel of one hand to his burning crotch. He groans ferally into her lovely white chest, maps out the angles of her spine with splayed sunburst hands. He wants to kiss each swollen breast until Ragnarok, until the end of the known universe, when the last remaining star burns out and he is still there kissing.

She moans deliciously and he kicks the door closed, takes her by the backs of her thighs into the bedroom and onto the bed. One long hand reaches again between her legs as she moves under him and over him, a veritable goddess, langurously undone. Smart Scully has no tight jeans, only wonderfully removable ones, and her panties don't match her bra and he loves her damnably for it. He licks the incurves of each creamy thigh, runs the flat of his tongue over the little hairs of legs and stomach. She has a trail of hair leading down to her pubis, and it is terribly endearing that she does not shave these little imperfections, and shows them to him with such wild abandon. One day, if he is lucky, he will devote an entire evening to getting acquainted with her stomach and lower back, but today he lifts her pretty calves and slides her panties aside to make her finally scream.

She tastes so gravely real. She tastes like swollen, unwashed woman, and he licks each fold and nodule like religious worship, flattens his tongue over her pulsing center like she is divine. It is impossible to imagine being inside this small, soft strain of woman when she makes these noises under his attentive mouth, gasping _Mulder, Mulder_ as she comes into his alabaster shoulder.

Nothing will ever match the feeling of moving inside Dana Scully as she groans, deep and feline, and arches her body into every thrust. _Scully_ , he says roughly, _Scully, you're so beautiful_ , and she is, and she has her head tossed back and her throat bared and through her wilderness of hair she smiles, wide around the edges, and his life is complete. Each hipthrust has him baying low into her miraculous ear, and he sucks on the sweet earlobe as she cries out, convulses, and he explodes into her like a white-hot star.

 

x

 

Sometimes she will look in the mirror and won't feel like crying. She no longer sees only the hatchetlike angles of her face and hipbones, which she thought impossible to hold and love, until Mulder laved his tongue over each of her myriad sharpnesses and said _You look like the solar corona_. She runs her fingers over these hollows of her body, each less deep than her cancer-hollow, and wishes Mulder would hurry up and kiss that one too, because she wants to be softer and more loving

of tall, morose G-men.

They haven't made love again, and she sometimes thinks of tilting down his arrogant Mulderface and eating the flesh of his lower lip. It's been three days and he's dragged her to Iowa, and somehow she still likes it when he leads her by the waist and tells her about werewolves. Their arguments have lost the tense edge of their cancerdays and become an intimate sparring, in which she methodically defuses his latest theory and stares at his landmark mouth.

For his part, Mulder is looking at the crown of her nose and thinking mutely about sublimation. He is already practiced in the art of silently loving Dana Scully as she counters his stupidities, and now in his excess time marvels at how she has come to show interest in her own silent loving. Sometimes he finds himself less than interested in the preternatural, and will make things up just so she'll confer with him in this strange closeness.

Scully has also drifted slightly from her original no-nonsense, gun-holster Agent Scully who chased Mulder down to Arecibo and placed her future cancerhollow to his undented skull. She's seen too much to sensibly reject his intuition, but it is good to put him down when he raves because it makes it seem like things haven't changed that much in seven years. She is still formidable Dana Scully, flushed with youth and intelligence and capable of two-minute verbal eviscerations. The only difference is that now they watch each other like the sun and the moon and it is all right to want to bite her partner, because they are standing in a field in Iowa perhaps six feet from a potential monster victim, and Mulder is looking at her face.

 

x

 

Mulder is peeling oranges for her. He doesn't use a knife, just pares off the outer skin with his fingernails and lets the juice run over his fist. She wants to lick his sweet knuckles, but doesn't, and they sit down together in that semidark office and eat four oranges back to back.

He brought them in the morning in a large wicker basket, and told her they were starburst. She didn't ask what starburst meant and didn't kiss the back of his neck, so she's really to blame for their physical separation now as he studiously sucks on a rind. Scully feels overwhelmed by the unthinkable sweetness of this one, simple gesture, as she considers that this almost-domestic Mulder is a man who leaps on trains and shoots serial killers and leaves her behind when he wants to solve a case.

“I want you to sleep over tonight.”

Mulder jerks and stares at her. “Yes,” he says. “Can we stop off at my place?”

“Why?”

He wrinkles his nose. There is no good answer for this except his vague notions of quick showers and a new tie, maybe, but Dana's chin is stained with orange juice, and she has her jacket off.

“Never mind.”

Dana sweeps the peels into a large wastebasket and he reaches for his coat. “Scully?”

“Yeah?” she says, and Mulder fits his lips snugly to hers in the pretty half-light with one hand at her jawbone and the other on his chair as he suspends himself in a funny bend. She is suddenly accosted by the bittersweet orange zest of his mouth and understands the word starburst as he gently swallows her lips and her wetness and cancer, and it almost seems like she'll never need that damned black jacket again.

 

x

 

She looks at his cheekbone in the tender predawn, and thinks that nothing will ever be as sharp and edible as Mulder's tilted face. The light comes in from her window onto his lips and collarbone and turns his damn shoulder silver in her bachelor's bed, and she thinks that if he stays there a moment longer she will never let him leave.

They have been so cold to one another, so willfully and woefully separate. It is only now that she is seeing this Mulder, with his sun-bruises and heartburn, with such glorious abandon. Before, she was only ever privy to the smallest and most delicate slivers of the inner Fox, little snatches in which she would bathe within his light, like a refugee from winter.

Dana lays her head to his throbbing artery and says, I would love you if you were blind and cancerous and made me throw up in the bathroom. I would love you if you ate me raw, and I would eat back the little heart-hollows and rib-splinters of your secluded breast, your mandarin lungs. I love you, because you fill the bullet-holes and sicknesses of my meat-cleaver hipbones, and think I'm beautiful,

and Fox turns his head and cries to her, I thought you would _die_.

Then he kisses her rolling mouth, and there are no hollows at all.

 

x

 

Epilogue.

 

 _Because, Mulder,_ she thinks. He has just asked her _why_ , and watched her iron shoulders fall loose and naked somewhere southerly. _Why has she kept him all these years?_ They are standing in the doorway of their basement office, and he has one lonely hand on her waist,

but it's _his_ hand, so it's not all that lonely. She imagines she is embracing it with her hips, like they are melting into one another, and God, does she love him unreasonably. He will never know just how much and how deeply she loves him now, as he stares down into her open eyes and smiles as he does so, and it's heartbreaking. Dana thinks that this man is the whole universe, everything that she will ever love or has loved or could ever love trapped into one body, tall and pouty and larger than life. She knows that she is only ever alive because of this one person, this one Fox Mulder, who looked up at her from under those round glasses and cried out at her over an open grave in the rain in Oregon,

who loves her madly, madly, and is staring at her with all the wideness and mirth of a child. To Mulder, his partner is anything and everything, has been all this forever and ever, ever since he sat down beside her post-abduction on the cold hospital floor and felt himself die. No, maybe it goes further back, back to when she extended that beautiful small hand to his hard jaw as they sweated in Puerto Rico, with his heart in his throat and her ear at the door, simply and magnificently glad they were alive. Mulder doesn't want to think about it too much, because he's sure that if he does it will stretch back all the way to that first time he saw her in Quantico, all those years ago, when he had no idea of her name or her wit and had only ever watched distantly that bob of red hair, that peaked nose, her lovely youthful cheeks.

He still has her ova tucked away somewhere in his apartment. He knows exactly where that somewhere is, and once told Scully quietly and made himself look into her eyes. Sometime, he imagines, a very faraway sometime, they just might take it out and create a child of their own. He thinks this would be his one penultimate gift to her, who he has taken so much from, to give her the chance to be a mother. It is really too overwhelming a thought as he watches her darling face and his love crashes against the jagged edges of his heart-cliffs, his wayside breast, as he thinks that nothing will ever be as glorious as Dana's half-moon smile.

Scully touches his nose with the pad of her thumb. For a while she was afraid that he didn't find her sexually attractive, and for a while she was afraid that he did. Now, she sees his pupils burn and blossom as she lifts her lips to his oyster-mouth, traces its full curves slowly with kisses. His hands rest on the ley-lines of her lower back, where she first felt the dizzying pull of his touch and tenderness, when he splayed his fingers right there on that sweet spot as they ran to avoid the searchgaze of helicopters. God, now that they think about it, there is a whole world of things – little things, gentle things – that has coaxed them into this oneness of bodies, and some are not so gentle.

Mulder has cried his throat out over Scully's comatose hand. Scully has tried over and over to fill the Samantha-hole in Mulder's system, and failed. Now, she thinks that the reason for her failure wasn't so much her inadequacy, as it was the fact that she is to Mulder completely other than a sister. The realization is so wonderfully liberating as she drags her fingers to his temples and cradles his gorgeous luminous head, kisses him incessantly into the warm darkness. The gap between her eyebrows is no more gap, but home,

home to Fox Mulder and his wildman's loving, his silent tendernesses and lotus-eating, a home he has coveted all these lonely years.

 _Why haven't you left me?_ he asks, as he tucks a stray hair behind her ear. Someday, someday close, he will bend down and lick once more the shell and shape of it, inhale again the sweetness of her romantic forehead, her swanlike throat-slopes. _Why did you stay?_

 _Because, Mulder,_ she whispers, touches his abject boyish mouth. _I love you._

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this patchwork of a fic! I subsist on feedback, please don't let my poor soul starve.   
> On tumblr as ourlostbodies, give me a shout.


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